Spanish Internet Provider's SMTP traffic Blocked 841
Andrew D Kirch writes "After being barraged by spam and 419 scams from Rima-TDE and telefonica.es [translated], the AHBL has announced that all of Spain's national ISP's e-mail will be blocked by their blacklisting service. One has to ask though, is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?"
Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:5, Informative)
A few other countries that can use this are found here [blackholes.us].
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:3, Funny)
EV1 [blackholes.us]
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:4, Informative)
"Blackholes.us does not list spammers, spam supporters or vulnerable hosts at the present time. These lists are meant to contain all known networks assigned or allocated to the respective provider or organizations within the respective country. Lists are created for research purposes, primarily, and are made public for any use others see fit."
It seems the purpose of the site is to list the IP ranges associated with various bodies in the event you should wish to block their traffic.
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:5, Funny)
I don't recieve email from friends in other countries. NEVER. So if a mail service could filter out anything that wasn't comming from the good ol USA, that would we sweet!
Granted I know some places have servers elsewhere, but then the should put some here in the US then shouldn't they?
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it would also filter out all of the crap about offers for cheap mortgages, cheap medications etc. etc. that are off no interest to me MAINLY BECAUSE I LIVE IN THE U.K.!
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:5, Funny)
The conclusion of the research:
Americans have small, limp penises.
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:5, Funny)
And you Europeans wonder why we drive huge SUVs and build gigantic houses!
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:3, Insightful)
Blacklists like this are the nazi way to fighting spam. Admins (and I'am an admin, too) use their godly powers to crash those spammers -- and just a few nearby unlucky innocent people. I have nothing against personal blacklists, but huge public lists are definitely not the way to go and this is exactly the example why.
Every anti spam tool should be measured in the terms o
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:5, Interesting)
- Paypal is unusable;
- Many other online ordering service block my whole area;
- I have been unable to find a colo provider with php/mysql that will either accept my payment or allow FTP from SE Asia for their free account;
- Loxinfo (the largest ISP here, I believe) users cannot post to Slashdot stories.
Living in a country that is a home for spam relays, FTP assaults, whatever... makes life much more difficult online, though I do none of this.Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:4, Insightful)
and get rid of the bad people/spammers.
And, gather up more people to complain.
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad neighborhood. (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in a place where I have difficulty finding a cab. If I call for one on the phone, they tell me to be out in the street waving for the cab, or they will drive past without stopping in the area. I never go out on a Friday or Saturday night without a bulletproof vest, and I'm always armed with at least one combat knife - often several.
This is where you live online. This is why people won't come to your place to deliver pizza. Or SMTP, or any other service.
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blackholes.us does not list spammers, spam supporters or vulnerable hosts at the present time. These lists are meant to contain all known networks assigned or allocated to the respective provider or organizations within the respective country. Lists are created for research purposes, primarily, and are made public for any use others see fit.
Really, all they're giving you is a list of IPs assosicated with the named nation or company. If you were to use all of those blacklists at once, you will have blocked out nearly every major hosting firm in the USA, and a good chunk of the world. Not just the spammers, but everything within those ranges. This is definitely a "We can't find the criminals, so we're nuking the town!" defense plan.
These lists are valuable if you want to lock out an entire provider... but realize that you're going to throw out a lot of legitimate servers in your quest to block a few Spammers. Unless you're sure you're never going to have customers in Mexico, don't throw out all of Mexico's IP space in one swipe.
Also, beware that these lists don't sort datacenters from customers. EV1's IP space for example is mostly servers, but they do operate a regional ISP as well. Block that whole range, and some dial-up customers might try to reach you and fail.
Think before you block...
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:5, Interesting)
And they must succeed, for if they do not, the legal eagles will be here to clean up and then the world will have to go off searching for a new Internet.
The freedom of the Internet is, IMHO, the top priority here. It is the one thing we may never trivialise. We're a fifth column here. The net is powerful -
So let them let off steam. Let them blacklist all of Spain. After all, Spain should do something. Let Spain work it out. If it does work out, it's not only a victory for anti-spam forces like us, it's a victory for a free Internet.
Tada.
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:3, Interesting)
Complaining to ChinaNet has made no difference, all we've had is an automated response that was in Chinese.
The sooner we just start blocking sources of spam wholesale the sooner we could see results I believe. I know it's a very extreme response,
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately for this sort of problem, there isn't an email equivalent to a Usenet Death Penalty (UDP). UDPs threatened or applied against major ISPs often tend to produce some meaningful action. Partly it works (to the extent that it does) because Usenet has a replication fabric controllable by a relatively small number of people, whereas email has no such system.
Maybe someone will stage a worm attack in the opposite direction from the usual -- writing a worm to scan the top spam sources lists and spamvertized website lists and DDoS them. It would do little for the problem directly, but it would increase the cost of doing business substantially for Chinanet and their kind. (okay, vigilante justice is usually very bad. But it's a fun fantasy.)
Korea was First, China Second (Score:5, Informative)
China's another popular place to block, not because of badly administered machines, but because of policies of tolerance of spammers and scammers and lack of useful response to abuse complaints. I haven't gotten much spam in Chinese in a while, but I still get lots with either the email origin or the web site located in China. And China's Internet access is controlled by the government telecom monopoly, who obviously don't mind spammers if they pay their bills.
So blocking a whole country isn't a new thing. But this isn't a whole country, it's just one of the major providers there. Spain doesn't censor their users' internet service - if you're blocking their mail, they can get themselves a Hotmail or Yahoo account to reach you.
Re:Korea was First, China Second (Score:5, Funny)
However, Chinese authorities have no tolerance against people who download anti-regime propaganda, or who sympathize with Falun Gong.
Hence, I solved my Chinese spam problem by adding the following to my sendmail.mc (it's only 4 lines, but Slashdot will probably cut the 3rd...):
# Really give the Chinese Spammers a mouthful...
changequote([[,]])dnl
define([[confSMTP_LOGIN_MSG]], [[EFGIC: U.S. Congress Condemns China's Oppression of Falun Gong on\nU.S. Soil and in China\n\nHouse Concurrent Resolution 304 calls on China's agents in\n the United States to halt all operations being carried out against\n practitioners of Falun Gong on United States' soil, as well as the brutal\n persecution of millions inside China.\n\nLONDON (EFGIC) - Last week, the US Congress introduced a concurrent\n resolution calling on the Chinese government to end its brutal\n persecution of Falun Gong in China and stop all activities against Falun\n Gong practitioners inside the United States.\n House Concurrent Resolution 304 (full text), introduced by Congresswoman\n Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, references China's own constitution and\n international human rights accords in calling for China to uphold\n freedom of belief, assembly, and speech for the millions of Falun Gong\n practitioners in Mainland China.\n Resolution 304 also specifically mentioned section 401(a)(1)(B) of the\n International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (22 U.S.C. 6401(a)(1)(B)):\n \"Whereas the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of\n religion, the right to assemble, and the right to speak freely, and the\n people of the United States strongly value protecting the ability of all\n people to live without fear and in accordance with their personal\n beliefs...\"\n Harassment, libel, and imprisonment have been widespread in\n Jiang Zemin's four-year campaign to eradicate Falun Gong. Torture and\n abuse in custody have led to thousands of wrongful deaths.\n]])dnl
changequote(`,')dnl
This will change your sendmail banner in such a way that spammers, should they dare to send to you, get a surprise visit from the political police ;-)
Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next. (Score:4, Insightful)
If it goes past a certain threshold (in my case, an SA score of 5 or greater) my server will prepend ****SPAM**** to the subject line. What you choose to have your mail client do with such mail, based upon the subject line match as well as whether the sender is in your adress book, etc. is 100% your decision.
In my personal case, I have a couple of sender domains, namely yahoogroups.com that while not spam are *sometimes* misflagged as such... Not surprising since they are mass-emailed messages that *DO* have advertising. My mail filters move these into a seperate folder before procsssing '***SPAM****" messages.
Spam is a bitch and I hate it as much as the next admin. Deleting or blocking said email is the *wrong* choice.
Re:Geeks (Score:5, Informative)
I think it is interesting that you call them arrogant fucksticks, when you have no clue at all how this stuff works. Hint: a block only becomes this big when the ISP has repeatedly ignored abuse reports over a long period of time. The only way to get their attention is to block them.
And, in fact, now that they have been blocked, they suddenly have shown an interest in dealing with their spam, and have contacted AHBL.
Note also that AHBL asked for details on address ranges, so they could tune the fine-tune the blocks to just catch the dynamic addresses (the ISP claims that most of the problems are from users at Internet cafes), and was ignored. Note also that the ISP could solve this problem with a simple block on outgoing port 25 from their Internet cafe customers.
Re:Geeks (Score:3, Interesting)
When you're blocking a national carrier I think that d
It's not something that'll ever go away (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like back in school, when the entire class would be put into detention because of the actions of one person, it was a pathetic method then and it's a pathetic method now. Ultimately, it comes down to the teacher/blocker being lazy and hoping that such drastic measures will induce the 'masses' to seek out and obliterate the offending party. I never saw such 'action' succeed at school, I doubt we'll see much happen from this either (apart from iritate a lot of people).
*disclaimer: school was more than half a lifetime ago - so perhaps my brain is rusty by now.
Re:It's not something that'll ever go away (Score:5, Interesting)
This is far less extreme than say, a spam filter that automatically flags email originating from hotmail and aol addresses as spam.
Re:It's not something that'll ever go away (Score:4, Interesting)
Not everyone uses yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc. A lot of local businesses will have localised mail servers, these people will now feel the crunch... I can imagine export type companies would really be wailing.
It's not like they all have time on their hands to start phoning up and complaning, let alone even KNOWING who to complain to (imagine if they're a few tiers down from the top ISP). How many of those business would know why their email all of a sudden wasn't being responded to.
Clients love getting email from joe@hotmail.com, very professional looking
While this may actually induce something to happen, I still feel the cost on the innocents is just too high.
PLD.
Re:It's not something that'll ever go away (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were a company who rented IP space from Telefonica De Espana, I'd be upset. They should be able to police their own network. I would have to consider taking my business elsewhere. Or, failing that, seek compensation for the increase in expense of hosting my company email server elsewhere.
The key here is generating a cost to ISPs who harbor spammers. After all, a spammer's fee is certainly incentive to sign them on. Without a counter incentive, we will quickly find ourselves in a classic tragedy of the commons situation.
A final point - email and the Internet in general is a powerfull, valuable resource that exists because various entities work together. When one (or more) entities threaten the workings of that resource, it should be of no suprise that others will decide to no longer work with them.
It might be unfair... (Score:3, Interesting)
The future of blocking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The future of blocking? (Score:3, Interesting)
The tricky thing about summaries like this is that different spammers exhibit different techniques, and distributions of received spam are not at all uniform. Spammers reuse address lists, control hosts which a
Shoot on sight... (Score:4, Funny)
Wait'll someone figures out.... (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one, would welcome it, living in the US. Get rid of my spam AND my e-mail. Productivity would go through the roof.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Insightful)
--jeff++
Blocklists don't block email (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, only *you* can block email to *your* server.
Re:Blocklists don't block email (Score:3, Interesting)
Those who blindly trust a blocklist will get burned eventually. Don't just trust some stranger you meet on the Internet to do your work for you... they will eventually screw up when you're not looking.
Gandi.net (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd LOVE to be able to block by registrar.
Does anyone know how to get a registrar shut down??
Re:Gandi.net (Score:3, Insightful)
Note also that with a few simple scripts blocking by registrar should be fairly easy.
Re:Gandi.net (Score:3, Interesting)
FYI, the domains are a
Now, I ask you, if the registrar does not respond to the complaints about one of their clients (who is not playing fair), what do you think IS fair and equitable treatment?
One problem with blocking entire countries (Score:3, Informative)
This doesn't happen overnight. (Score:3, Informative)
Rima-tde's long time treatment of abuse complaints has lead to them being labeled by many in the community as a rogue provider.
This has continued for quite some time, as evidenced by archived usenet posts (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rima-tde&ie=UT
Getting up there along with the likes of HINET and Chinese state-run providers takes some serious work, and in goes to show Telefonica De Espana's commitment to its spammers!
Congratulations to them on this well deserved moment of (in)fame.
Bah, typical slashfoo (Score:3, Interesting)
Most slashdotters are benefiting from some kind of mail filtering and don't even realize it. They are like peaceniks bitching about the very defense establishment that keeps them free to bitch.
I never heard of the AHBL before this article. There are tons of lists. A list that would block a major ISP is probably a niche list aimed at small domains who are not going to have 10,000 angry customers. If SPEWS blocked this ISP, it might be news. If some unknown list does it, so what?
If you find it shocking that a list would shoot from the hip, don't ever query xbl.selwerd.cx. Fast, broad and unforgiving!
Before the inevitable whining chorus of broad-listing-is-bad-what-about-the-innocent-vict
And remember, also, that you are almost certainly benefiting from a lot of filtering implemented by your postmasters or even network admins (at border routers). They spend a huge amount of time compiling lists of bad domains and netblocks - why shouldn't they share that knowledge with other admins? Such sharing is most efficiently done by publishing a DNS-based list like SPEWS. The high profile lists are more professionally maintained than most ISP's in-house lists. Would you rather they share in secret, so small operators can't benefit from their knowledge?
Re:Bah, typical slashfoo (Score:5, Informative)
We are apparently in wide enough use that we deal with TDE customers on a daily basis that are complaining that they are blocked.
Its not our primary focus to be the biggest.
Our primary focus is to protect our systems, and the systems we manage, from spam and abuse. We make our data available to anyone and everyone, because we know that our data will improve on the feedback of our users.
So far, we have had zero complaints from our users as to our blocking methods, even if they are extreme at times.
This is a good idea, but... (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't just block Spain. I set my system to blackhole the whole damn world!
Just think of it! All over the world, anybody tries to send me email, and it disappears into a black hole. Eat dirt, spammers!
And of course all the legitimate email disappears as well. But that's the point! When I talk to someone and they complain that I didn't respond to their email, I explain that it's not me - it's their world's policies about spam! Once you get your act together and get spam off the net, then I'll unblock you, I say. Until then, don't come crying to me - talk to your ISP, to your elected representatives, to the UN. That's where the problem is, and until you can solve it with them... you're blocked.
Yup. I figure this spam business is going to get cleaned up PDQ once people realize what it's costing them. We're going to get a nice, spam-free net, and it's all because of me. You're welcome.
I say block it. (Score:3, Interesting)
China is the worst for me because some jerk spammer is sending junk with my domain on the reply-to. His stuff is hosted in China and there's not a thing I can do.
AHBL policies (Score:5, Informative)
We only resort to this wide range listings when we're run out of options. In the case of TDE, we just do not have any more patience.
We gave them time. We sent them abuse reports. We even asked them to provide us with accurate information on their netblocks so we can tune our listings down to only their dynamic customers.
However, they ignored our requests.
The AHBL has very strict policies on what we will and will not do.
We are taking a strong stance on 419 and phishers right now - just take a look at our ongoing fight with megamailservers.com - we caught them in a lie with their phishing customers, and we are holding them responsible.
If we are having an effect or not, it doesn't really matter to me. All I do know is that we are taking a stance and asking others to support us.
The hope being that with enough people working with us, we will be able to force providers to do something about their problems.
Feel free to flame me all you want.
Re:AHBL policies (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a little-known (in the U.S.) fact that people in other countries speak languages other than English.
For instance, I live in France, and my mail provider in the U.S. uses a whole bunch of these predominantly U.S.-based blacklists. Much of the mail sent via French ISPs by my friends is blocked because just once, perhaps seven or eight months ago, someone managed to send some spam from an account with those ISPs before having
Blocking Entire Countries (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I get anywhere between one thousand and one hundred thousand spams a week directed at my domain from some asshat in Brazil. They come addressed to user1@mydomain.com, user2@mydomain.com, etc., in alphabetical order. Tens of thousands of them. And that's just the Brazilian stuff. That doesn't include the mortgage ads, 419 scams, porn ads, and advertisements that will help me make my wife's penis larger.
Since I'm the only person who uses my domain, and I don't read Portuguese anyway, these are nothing but a drain on my bandwidth and resources, even if I were inclined to buy penis enlargement cream for my wife.
And since I use a hosting service I can't implement a connection-level block because I don't have root on the box. Implementing SpamAssassin on the hosting server brings their box to its knees (I know because I've done it and they shut down my account); instead, I have to dedicate one of my own boxes to scanning all this shit -after- downloading it. My box does virtually nothing else.
And since my domain is my last name, I can't exactly change it easily.
SMTP is broken. It has outlived its usefulness, and it is past time for it to die. Born in an era when the internet was a far safer place, patches and scanning placed on top of it to stop spam do nothing to put the burden of sending mail where it belongs: on the sender. While tools like SpamAssassin, SpamBouncer and RBLs help us to avoid seeing the crap in our inboxes, they remain kludges that still eat up our processor time, bandwidth, infrastructure and money.
But all my work in call centers has taught me that stupid people will always exist, and that some of them can never be taught to behave properly. This means that any schmuck with enough money and enough time and some basic Google literacy can set up a broken copy of $YOUR_FAVORITE_SMTPD on $YOUR_FAVORITE_OS and become the latest spew.
Proposals exist (Dr. Dan Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 [cr.yp.to] is one of several) to shift the burden of storage and processing from the receiver to the sender. All well and good, but nobody's bothered writing a bunch of cross-platform implementations that everybody will actually switch to, and that Microsoft won't be able to embrace and extend.
So where does that leave us mere mortals, except to use the hypersonic planet-smashing axe to kill the maggot-laying fly?
Re:Blocking Entire Countries (Score:4, Interesting)
The essential problem is that email is a push technology by necessity. A successful antispam technology protects the entry point to the system, but protecting the entry point is a Hard Problem.
As a Spaniard... (Score:4, Insightful)
Contrary to what many people seem to think here, the announcement doesn't say thay'll block the whole country. That measure would be draconian, along the line of nuking a city to quench a major disturbance.
Instead, they say (correctly) that they are blocking the offending IDE, which "is the govt run ISP of Spain" so it can be expected that this ISP provider is a major provider, and many people will be affected. I believe that. Telefonica was, until a few years ago, _the one and only_ telephone communications provider of Spain. It is BIG.
This is unfortunate, but _if_ this provider really is such a non-cooperative major source of spam and hack attacks, then I can't blame them for blocking it, much as it pains me.
Re:As a Spaniard... (Score:4, Informative)
It's true that the announcement does'nt say that they'll block the whole country, but telefonica rents his lines to other companies, so they will be blocking a lot of people, a lot more than the 50%.
Its incorrect that telefonica is the gov's isp, it was few years ago, but the previus government privatized it so the new government (we have elections a month ago) doesn't have any control over the company.
The process of privatizacion was very obscure, a lot of directives getting a large amount of money, the new president that was designed was a friend from school of the old government president, etc etc.
We've got only a pair of alternatives and isn't as easy as it seems to change provider, for example you can't change company in the first year whithout paying a large amount of money.
We're paying what the previous government do, they do their worst in exterior relationships, they had a very bad plan about new technologies, education, etc. For example Spain got the worst number of internet connections, internet services and the most expensive connections of Europe.
Telefonica got the worst client hot line you can imagine and they don't pay any attention to what the users says, but you've got no alternatives in the most of the cases.
So as a Spaniard and as a Telefonica user i thought that it isn't fair to ban the whole company ips but it's fair to make telefonica pay a large amount of money or punish it other way.
PD: sorry for my english
Society doesn't work like an ideal... (Score:5, Insightful)
-----
Somebody robs a bank and flees.
The cops don't know where he is, but know that he can't have fled beyond 5 blocks.
The cops cordon off those 5 blocks.
Everybody within can't leave, everybody outside can't get in.
Does society, in general, get pissed wtih
A. The bankrobber, for robbing the bank, making this a likely necessity
B. The police, for preventing people from going where they want
Answer : B
-----
A local TV transmitter gets notice from a commercial network that the commercial network will no longer pay the transmitter to be aired. They'll have to put them on the air for free.
The local TV transmitter gives them the finger and pulls them off the air.
Delicate issue : the commercial network carries soap operas that are hugely popular within the local region.
Does society typically blame
A. The commercial network for using their show's/shows' popularity to try and strong-arm the local transmitter for a better deal
B. The local transmitter for making it impossible to watch their favorite show
Answer : B. Real story where I'm from, and people ended up getting TV dishes en-masse.
--
Same thing with this...
Do you really think all those Spanish people are going to blame their ISP for hosting (known) spammers once they get word/realize that their mails out to the world are bouncing/getting eaten ?
Of course not. They're going to say "wtf. stupid blacklists - that e-mail has to be there today, and that blacklisting of my ISP is the reason it can't. I guess I'll have to hotmail it. *expletive*"
That's how cause and effect is going...
effect : ISP is blacklisted
cause : ISP hosts spammers
NOT the legitimate people's problem!
at least, until...
effect : people can't send e-mail
cause : blacklists
Therefore - blame the blacklists!
you see, there is no
effect : people can't send e-mail
cause : ISP hosts spammers
relationship to most of society, so they're not about to blame the spammers.
And as much as I disagree with that stance, and would poke at my ISP to see if they can get off the blacklists a.s.a.p., I can't say that I blame users who point at the blacklists instead.
Maybe if blacklists could warn ISPs' users 3 days in advance. Maybe... mass e-mail them
Not the first time (Score:3, Interesting)
And since this is in the "Your Rights Online" category: I think everyone has the right to refuse mail from anyone else. If an ISP uses this blocking list without properly informing his customers and without offering a way for his customers to opt-out of this kind, then this ISP is obviously at fault, not the people who publish the blacklist. The latter are simply like a consumer magazine that advises against buying a particular product because it performed very bad compared to other tested products.
A blessing in disguise (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in 2000 already, Tom Geller made this statement in a discussion [tgeller.com] with the EFF: Mind you, it is the Spanish government's explicit duty under EU legislation to stop precisely this situation from happening to all of Europe - this is the very reason why Directive 2002/58/EC [eu.int] was adopted in the first place, and its wording is crystal clear - anything that is not opt-in (with the onus on the sender to prove it) is strictly illegal: It was a long hard fight [slashdot.org] getting this on the statute books almost all across an entire continent - but now, finally, the law is definitely not on the spammers' side.
Blacklists are a bad idea in the first place, but if legitimate eMail gets blocked because a provider fails to fight spam, it is that ISP (rather than the blacklist operators) who deserves all the wrath of its customers.
Sad as the current situation is, combined with the onslaught of Trojan eMail [slashdot.org] it will hopefully make Spanish businesses and citizens pressure their authorities to enforce a draconian crackdown on the perpetrators - finally treating spammers as the cyber-terrorists they are.
Just a typo (Score:3, Funny)
See, just that one letter messed up the whole country when it was caught by a filter run on the config file. Look for similar things to happen to:
Seriously, haven't these folks ever heard of a spell checker?
The internet is NOT a human right! (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a roommate. This roommate has a child. This roommate's babysitter would enter my home and during that time, things would disappear. And after changing the locks twice, I arrived at the conclusion that the items were disappearing either through my roommate or the roommate's babysitter. I decided to notify the police and before my roommate would give me the babysitter's contact info, the roommate called the babysitter to inform about the situation.
They both deny any wrong-doing and no property was recovered however, once I booted the roommate, my theft problem disappeared with the roommate.
Living in my home was a priviledge and when that priviledge was abused I needed to take action since all other outlets were met with opposition, denial or attempts to evade. Ultimately, just like the blocking of SMTP traffic from Spain, I had to cut off the problem from the source.
Obviously no one expects the situation with Spain to be permanant. I expect when the lesson is learned and enough cries are heard, they will be restored without the scam-spam problem they once had.
The Public Internet is a priviledge, not a right.
Unfortunately, large blocklistings are necessary. (Score:4, Informative)
So I unblocked their relays a week ago to see the input IPs and LART each spam originating from worm-infected Wanaspew customer PCs [google.com]. Surprisingly, the whole mess hasn't been coming from thousands of wormed Weendoze boxes, but merely from *four* (later six) different input IPs. A responsible ISP wouldn't have any problem in preventing a handful of customers from emitting spam.
Wanapoo did nothing. In spite of 44 (!) complaints to Spamadoo and some further communication with the French ISP association AFA France, the same customer IPs I've been LARTing up to 10 times since Sunday last week were still spamming on Friday [google.com].
So there are only two solutions left - either eat your spam or dig a deep hole, put Wanadoo's netblocks including their email relays in and let them rot there. Writing spam complaints to Wanadoo is futile.
This is news? Slashdot already blacklists TDE (Score:5, Informative)
My family actually lives in Spain, and uses Telefonica as their ISP. During my last visit, I discovered a wonderful surprise: Slashdot already blacklists the entire Telefonica data block. Whenever you select a link to read a story's comments, etc., it comes up with some message about not allowing that operation due to abuse from the netblock. It was pretty cool, really.
In any event, Telefonica is a big, monolithic telephone operator. They used to be the official, national telephone monopoly company before the market was opened up to other operators. Telefonica is still huge, nonetheless. They have voice, data, and cell phones in Spain; I think they also own a good chuck of media there. They run a pretty sizeable percentage of the telco business in South America (possibly the largest telco in the region). They bought our Terra back in the 90's, which bought out the Lycos networks for those that actually care.
Telefonica could probably have worse service, but they would need to train their personnel for it. As with most old monopolies there's this pervasive company culture that they are the center of the universe and if you don't like it you can go jump off a cliff or something. So I'd suggest not holding your breath for this situtation to be resolved. Although, as with every bureaucracy, every once in a while messages accidentally make it to the desk of the one guy who has a clue...
-Jack Ash
Using blacklists is OPTIONAL (Score:5, Insightful)
We only block based on a few external lists (ORDB, SpamCop, Blitzed Proxy), and then, not unconditionally. 90% of our blocks are done by internally generated lists, because we do have to receive mail from compromised sources at times... our business customers have clients in countries that are notorious for spamming, and even on ISPs that are bad.
That said, we do not accept any mail on the first pass from a large number of subnets, varying in size from /24 up to /8's, and a growing number of European subnets are on that list - not just Spanish ones. Mail from these subnets is "soft-bounced" (given a 451 error code) until it can be reviewed for legitimacy. And anything that doesn't have at least 1 retry is judged to be a proxy-based spam attempt.
Now, I will check bounces against some of the more agressive lists in deciding whether to make exceptions for these "soft bounces", but the final authority is a check with the customer on anything questionable. A million-customer ISP can't do that; that's one of our advantages...
Re:about time (Score:5, Insightful)
Blanket measures like this are wrong. Target the individual ISP's that are known bad.
Re:about time (Score:5, Informative)
Re:about time - Telefonica incompetance (Score:4, Insightful)
Telefonica.es administrators are simply utterly incompetant and have been for years - they don't care one hoot, maybe now their own sence of self preservation will take over (though it's sad that it has to go this far before there is any hope of them taking action).
There was a large degree of debate when they first joined the European Union that less wealthly nations such Spain and Portugal joining would upset the balance, so they were 'eased in' thanks to legislation allowing for a transition period. Now, they are economicaly fully integrated, but cultural issues still remain. I think their behavior in this reguard is glaring example of the level of sophistication and competance in a highly technical field not being up to par.
Spain, South America, Africa and the less developed parts of Asia are main sources of spam (at least, the spam I receive). While South America, Africa and Asia all have understandable economic reasons for being sources of such abuse, the Spanish ought to be able to keep order and it's a damning indictment of their abilites that they have been unable to for so many years. What's even more depressing is I predict that we see a new influx of spam from the Eastern European nations now joining the EU in the not-too-distant future.
Re:incompetence outside of the US? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a european and the occasional relayed-by-spain spam message doesn't even make the 95% that is relayed by US based machines.
Don't assume, measure, balance, and do something about your own country's companies. It could be your neighbour.
And that guy 3 postings up has a valid point: 80% of all spam topics are US centric. I should blacklist all US IP numbers for that. The US is capitally guilty of keeping spam in place, either by the largest DEMAND (companies and customers), or by non-conclusive legislation.
Re:incompetence outside of the US? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a European too, and I've been getting Spam from Telephonica for 6+ years. Just because you don't understand the reasons behind why this course of action has taken place, doesn't mean it's not warrented, and it certainly doesn't mean you should defend their behavior.
I receive virtually zero spam from US based source IP's and many from telephonica.es - given that the US has *VASTLY* more internet users than the smaller, less well connected Spain is quite damning on Telephonica's part.
Dispite your assertions the US does more than any other nation to prevent and clamp down on spam. Impefect as it is, no comparible level of anti-spam ligitation has been passed in any other nation (though a few sops have been thrown here and there).
Don't assume, measure, balance, and do something about your own country's companies. It could be your neighbour.
I'm from the UK, we do comparibly quite a good job here (dispite poor legislation, largely thanks to the watchful behavior of ISP's), and yes it is one of our neighbours that's reponsible for a very high volume of Spam, that 'neighbour' is Spain.
Telephonica is such a problem child that this is long over due. Many of us (who keep track of the source IP's of our spam) are frankly sick and tired of their **** and it's about time this happened.
You can automatically bash the US all you like (for all the good it will do you), but the problem here is a company in an EU member country pisses of thousands of people all over the world though it's lax and unprofessional business standards, because they are too incompotent to sort out a problem I can recall them having for at least the last 6 years (thanks largely to it's proximity to North Africa and the large number of Cyber Cafe's no doubt).
Go on and black list US IP's if you like, I'd find that amusing. That's actually likley to INCREASE your spam to genuine mail ratio.
Re:incompetence outside of the US? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not an unreasonable start for a definition. If your the webmaster of example.com, and your ads are coming through an smtp server in example.com's domain, your going to be careful not to get your domain blacklisted. Most hosting provider's have some way of alowing you to compose Email on your local machine, and sending through your hosted domain. Even if they don't, a perl or asp script on your websever can do the trick real easy.
Anyone with the knowhow that is paying for an internet conection deserves the right to use that internet conection as they see fit. No you don't, you have the rights given in your ISP's Terms of Service. And I'd bet that all of those rights are subject to change without prior notification. If you don't like the service provided by your ISP, simply find one who does. You can even look into getting a raw pipe for yourself, then you can deal with all of an ISP's headaches.
The Bottom line is an Internet cafe that doesn't block out-going port 25 is just an open-relay that requires your physical presence.
Re:about time - Telefonica incompetance (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:you mean BIG? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:about time (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:about time (Score:3, Insightful)
Elitist fuck, many
Re:about time (Score:3, Insightful)
Look where that got us, eh?
Re:about time (Score:4, Insightful)
When solving a problem it is common to take a method and try it. When it fails, try another. But above all, do something."
Re:about time (Score:3, Interesting)
If the choice is this or nothing, I'll take nothing. Would you be happy with this if you lived in Spain?
Now if you want to do something constructive, switch to cryptographic tagged aliasing (basically, what Spam Gourmet does). It works, you're in control, and it doesn't break anything. My recent paper [ucdavis.edu] shows why this approach is much more suitable than white|black-listing.
Re:about time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:about time (Score:3, Interesting)
Your concept of the money flow with spamers is wrong. Spamers get paid by compaines that think they will sell something to the end users. The result is most of the people who paid the spamers never make any sales at all.
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do we really know that isn't being run by some group of spammers bent on making sure only their spam gets through? It might operate reliably for a while, then start to get compromize itself slowly...
Those who are operating real blocklists need to do something to earn trust besides putting a blocklist forward, that's the suspicious package we're trying to investigate the contents of.
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:4, Funny)
Much like the U.S. government.
Max
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:3, Informative)
You are right. No single blacklist is worthy of making a "accept/reject" decision for your mail.
But most are somewhat trustworthy. The problem is not so much "do I accept data from this particular blacklist, yes/no", but "how trustworthy on a float scale between 0 and 1 is this particular blacklist". Once you accept shades of grey, and once you accept a multitude of spam indicators, some of which need to be scaled, you get a pretty good trust metr
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:3, Informative)
The bigger problem with spamassassin is that it's not built into the SMTP daemons, so you have to accept the mail before you can process it. If Spamassassin worked during the DATA phase of the SMTP transaction, then you could still drop the email and return a 550. If you receive it and THEN process it with SA, you get several problems.
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:3, Interesting)
I say it's yours.
Please clarify. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the same reason why organizations such as Spews.org, when leveraging their clout correctly, can get things fixed: they get the regular end users after the ISP to fix their problems. Spain now can't email a LOT of places. Spain. Not just TDE customers, but ALL people there. Now, all of TDE will be complaining to TDE, along with TDE's partners. Their competitors. Heck, maybe the government. They'll clean up their act, or else. If they don't, that's fine too, if they don't want to email anyone.
Remember that no one on the Internet is obligated to accept traffic from anyone. Be it email or otherwise. If I choose to block you from mailing me via my website, or from even viewing my site--or if I decide this of your entire country--that is my decision. My IP address(es), my mailbox, my rules. ISPs flaunt my wishes by spamming me, and they get dropped.
So, again, why is this bad if it forces them under huge pressure to fix their issues?
Re:Please clarify. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a large number of customers in Spain, and you're configured to use this blacklist... you're screwed. It'll take several hours before you realize why you stopped getting customer e-mails.
Using these blocklists in an automated mode is a very dangerous thing. You never know what collateral group of non-spammers will be blocked next.
Re:Please clarify. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well thats the whole point, its a last resort issue. The ISP should have been warned several times and refused to do anything. I remember when orbit was operating it stumbled onto a few mail servers at the university I was an admin for. I was way overworked -- didn't know I had open relays (this was still when spam was an under the radar issue), I fixed it within four hours of getting the wa
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortunately, I can work around this by relaying mail through a non-blacklisted server, but most subscribers won't have the ability or access to do that. And if the ISP ever turns off port 25, I may have no choice but to relay through their servers
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? (Score:4, Informative)
There is one blacklist I trust day in and day out, though: ORDB. That's because ORDB will only list confirmed open relays. This is a conservative approach but it means that if a host is listed, there is no question of whether or not it belongs there. Also, there is an automated retest-and-removal system. I can't use ones like SPEWS because even though I mostly sympathize (although I think they are *way* too quick on the trigger), in my business that would block far too much legit mail and we just can't do that.
Re:perhaps? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is seen as a technical issue for the company to resolve.
Re:perhaps? (Score:3, Informative)
They are as government independent as the BBC or DeutscheTelekom or the BundesPoste. If they were independent and a commercial enterprise, perhaps they would take the actions of those trying to preserve the Internet for the rest of us from the spammers, script-kiddiez and terrorists as seriously as they should.
Re:National ISP (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Blacklist 'em all. (Score:3, Insightful)
Spain is one of the largest economies in Europe and one of the largest tourist venues in the world.
Apart from this, are you preparing to negate the value of communicating with a whole country for the convenience of not having to delete a few emails?
You must be nuts!
Re:The answer is yes (Score:3)
Well, yeah
However horrible the purpose, NK seems successful at it.
Oh give me a fucking break (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, I don't really need any justification in bl
Re:Internet passports (Score:5, Informative)
This is a silly argument. Criminals will forge i.d.'s regardless of the law *because - duh! - they're criminals. It's what they do*.
And if you think it's difficult to forge a driver's license or a passport, from *any* country, you've been swallowing too much government bullshit. For $500-$1000 you can get a completely new, legal identity that'll check out if the government investigates it, because it was purchased directly from the folks who control the system that issues i.d.'s in the first place. I could, in 48 hours, get a perfectly valid (and new) SSN, drivers license, and birth record entry which will hold up under government scrutiny *because the folks who control the system will sell them to me, and they aren't forged*. I can get decent forgeries for just a few hundred bucks, if I don't need to pass a serious security check.
Internet i.d.'s will be no different, and no harder to forge. Or to buy, from the right people.
Max
Re:Internet passports (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, most IDs even work in such a context. They are not constructed to be unforgeable, they are construced to be hard (read: expensive) to forge, and this is their sole purpose. They increase the cost of "doing business" for criminals.
And even if an ID is forged, as long as it is expensive to forge, most criminals will have few of them, and losing or exposing one of their IDs will be a heavy loss
Re:Internet passports (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it isn't. Government has proven to be entirely ineffectual at doing anything to stop, slow down, or even reduce spam by one teeny tiny little bit. Government efforts are, in this context, laughable at best.
The 'crazed vigilantes' stand a much better chance of getting some action than any government law has in the past. Fact is, I think this is a good thing; it shows that while gove
Re:Internet passports (Score:3, Insightful)
Boy you are a True Believer(tm) aren't you!?!
Name one thing the Government (any government) does well?
As For SPEWS and others, their actions are based on actual monitored events (spam) and not the whim of some dictator or someone doing a favor for a bribe.
Further, the use of these BlackLists is TOTALLY voluntary. You don't have to use them. Run your own MTA.
But let the government ge
Re:Internet passports (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Internet passports (Score:4, Interesting)
3) Change once to an ISP that doesn't tolerate spamming on its network. They DO exist.
Have worms on your Windows box: your ID is revoked.
Which means a huge subset of users would lose the ability to send mail anyway. Same supposed problem with blacklists, except in your solution, they lose it completely.
x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
No-one has even tried because the ideas got shot down by professional hand-wringers
It has been tried, repeatedly. It has failed, just as repeatedly. This idea of yours is not new, not practicle, and all but unimplimentable.
(x) Sending email should be free
I disagree. E-mail "stamps" would be a good idea.
Email stamps would be a very BAD idea. Spammers already steal accounts, bandwidth, server space... what makes you think they wouldn't steal "stamps?"
All in all, a very naive suggestion.
Re:What action? (Score:3, Informative)
This is a social problem. Not a political problem. Trying to make it a political problem is just going to make the situation worse.
- Politicians run the government.
- The government of Spain runs TDE.
- TDE is blacklisted as a spam ISP.
Who *but* the politicians can do something about this?
Re:The key problem (Score:3, Informative)
In those cases, the MAIL ADMINS give them the right to exert that power, and they have full rights to do so, since they do not and CAN NOT grant that right outside their own network.
I can only assume none of these people asking questions like this have ever run any sort of real mail server.